Cameron’s blind spots on zero hours and food banks

David Cameron has been accused of dodging questions on his record as prime minister.

Labour – and some media commentators – are suggesting Mr Cameron failed to answer properly questions on food banks and zero-hours contracts during last night’s interview with Jeremy Paxman.

The prime minister did concede that the use of food banks had gone up, but said he didn’t have the exact figures.

He was more precise about zero-hours contracts, saying they accounted for about one in 50 jobs, and saying some people choose to work on that basis.

Let’s see if we can fill in some of the blanks.

Food banks

Mr Cameron used to like to point out that the use of food banks – which provide emergeny parcels of food to people in danger of going hungry – started to go up under Labour.

That’s perfectly true, but the rise we saw before 2010 has been dwarfed by the speed of growth under the coalition:

The Trussell Trust – the main provider of food banks in the UK – said they had given three days’ food to more than 900,000 people in 2013/14, up from 347,000 the year before.

The numbers are on course to top 1 million in 2014/15.

Mr Cameron told Paxman: “Obviously there has been an increase in food bank use. That’s partly because of, you know, the difficulties we have faced as a country.

“It’s also, Jeremy, because we changed the rules. The previous government didn’t allow jobcentres to advertise the existence of food banks.”

It’s true that the Conservatives changed policy to let benefits advisers direct people facing hardship to local food banks – but this hasn’t been a significant factor in the rise in food bank use, according to the Trussell Trust.

The charity told us only about 2-5 per cent of people who come to them are referred by benefits advisers.

But people who use the banks often blame the benefits system for their predicament. About 45 per cent of people say “benefit delays” or “benefit changes” are why they have turned to food banks.

Zero-hours contracts

On the face of it, this looks like bad news for Mr Cameron too.

At first glance, the Office for National Statistics figures suggest a massive recent rise in the number of people on “zero-hours” contracts – where someone is not contracted to work for a specific number of hours, and is only paid for the hours they work.

The ONS recorded 697,000 people on zero-hours contracts in 2014 compared to 168,000 in 2010. The latest figure is 2.3 per cent of people in employment, so just over the one in 50 claimed by Mr Cameron.

But we should be careful not to assume there has really been a big jump under the coalition.

These figures come from the Labour Force Survey – a questionnaire of about 40,000 households used to estimate changes in the wider job market.

The statisticians think this massive recent rise in people who say they are on zero-hours contracts could just reflect the fact that the term has been used more widely in the media over the last couple of years, so more people are likely to know what it means.

The ONS says: “It is not possible to say how much of this increase is due to greater recognition of the term ‘zero-hours contracts’ rather than new contracts.”

CIPD surveys found that 47 per cent were satisfied with having no minimum hours, 27 per cent say they are dissatisfied and 23 per cent were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied.

Some 60 per cent of zero-hours workers said they were “satisfied with their current job” – compared to 59 per cent of all employees.

Quality and quantity of work

The prevalence of zero-hours contracts is often used to suggest that, despite the rise in employment seen under the coalition, the quality and security of jobs has fallen.

It’s true to say that there are more self-employed people and more people doing part-time and temporary jobs than just before the last election – but there is also more employment and more permanent and full-time jobs too.

The actual jobs mix has actually changed very little, as our two pie charts show:

These figures don’t include every type of employment counted by the ONS – and the headline employment figures don’t usually include temporary work. We have selected them to show changes in temporary, part-time and self-employed work.

The proportions have hardly changed. In February to April 2010 60 per cent of workers were employees working full-time. In the latest quarterly figures the number was 59.8 per cent.

The change in employment represents a rise of more than 2 million people in employment of one kind or another under the coalition – more than 1.1 million of these were full-time employees.

So the rise in employment claimed by the coalition can’t be explained away by increases in self-employment, part-time and temporary work.

More from Channel 4 FactCheck

12 reader comments

2ndSkinsays:

The zero hours contracts section is spun very heavily in favour of the government. Let’s try to shed some light on it.

1) The ONS has already used in 2013 the excuse that the soaring ZHC figures are a result of increased recognition of the term (you would really have to have been living in a cave not to know the term “zero hours contracts” by now): “it increased its estimate for the number of workers on the contracts in 2012 from 200,000 to 250,000. The new methodology helped to produce the high figure for 2013.”http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/mar/10/rise-zero-hours-contracts

The first figures were produced in April 2014. To still be using the same excuse for the vast increase in ZHCs is ridiculous.

2) Thanks to a request to the ONS regulator from Labour’s Chukka Umunna, the ONS now uses both the LFS and other measures. The LFS measure is 697,000 (2.3% of people in employment) for October to December 2014.

3) The CIPD survey is not particularly trustworthy, the CIPD being an HR organisation that stands to gain a great deal from ZHCs. We should also remember that it is i part based on the LFS survey as well and is therefore as (un)reliable as the ONS survey, It contains sentences like this:

“On average 65% of zero-hours workers say they are satisfied with
their work–life balance compared with 58% of all employees.”

Fair enough. But then it also hides figures that it doesn’t like:

“Just under one in three zero-hours workers are looking for a new
job compared with 24% of all employees.”

So that would be more zero-hours workers are looking for a new
job than “all employees”, which is itself a basically meaningless comparison. Even more flagrantly:

“29% of zero-hours contract workers say they feel under excessive
pressure either every day (8%) or once or twice a week (21%). This
compares with 41% of all employees who feel under excessive pressure either every day (13%) or once or twice a week (28%).”

They’re ZHCs! We don’t know how often they work so how we can compare these two statements? After that point you know you don’t need to pay any more attention to that particularly study.

Cameron cannot bring it upon himself to accept that his government has caused so much hardship to so many people .i hope and pray that he does not win the General Election . He is not a man to be trusted

Fact check needs to be more careful when repeating claims by Trussell Trust that it gives food packages to 913,000 people. I suspect it gave out that number of 3 day packages but it will not know how many people that is. I would suggest that it is a certaint that most people are repeat ‘customers’. It is therefore misleading to say ‘people’ rather than ‘3 day packages’. Factcheck must be 100% clear that the accurate statement is that ‘the Trussell Trust gave out 913,000 3 day packages of food’. This is important for many reasons but one is clearly that an increase in the supply of food to provide could account for all, or a significant proportion of the increase in foodbank use. It is possible that the same number of people are receiving more food not that more people are accessing fodbanks. I am not saying this the case but I am saying that from the data provided this could be the case.

If you are claiming to be a ‘fact-checker’ then you need to check this one:

“The Trussell Trust said they had given three days’ food to more than 900,000 people in 2013/14.”

No: they gave out 900,000 **food parcels**; the actual number of *people* in receipt is markedly lower because of double-counting the same people – clients can go up to nine times in a year.

Buried in the footnotes of the last charity report in 2014 is a note about a bit of research they did into this issue, based on a sample of foodbanks where, for the purposes of the research, they checked on multiple claims and who was making them.

Based on the samples in the charity report, it could therefore be estimated that the *total* number of *individuals* who ate something from a Trussell Trust foodbank last year was probably about 500,000, of whom about 350,000 only had to do so ONCE.

About 150,000 needed to have a second bite, but fewer than 50,000 of those appear to have needed sustained help over a period of a fortnight or more.

This is a rather different picture than “one million staving from austerity”.

1) The fact that 730,000 (rounding down) of those people in work are simply a result of confidence returning to employers, and pre-crisis levels of employment being restored.
2) The fact that the population has increased (largely due to failure on immigration) 2.27m in 5 years, equating to an extra 1,050,000 (rounding down) ’employed persons’.
3) The fact that wages are indisputably lower than 5 years ago, meaning large companies can employ more people at the same cost, make higher profits, and employ even more people at low wages (with taxpayers covering the consequent rise in in-work benefits payments).
4) The fact that people have been forced to work for less than the minimum wage in order to receive their benefit payments.

As for the low Jobseekers Allowance claimant count, download the Government data on Jobseekers Allowance sanctions from 2005 to 2015, then download the Government data on homelessness from 2005 to 2015.

The biggest increase of all in percentage terms is 28% in part-time self employment. It is only the permanent part-time employee numbers that have increased in lower percentage terms than full-time employees.

New full-time jobs are only 55% of the total increase in employment. As the above summary does not lend itself to identify into which of the above categories the ZHCs fall, It seems that in theory, any number up to a maximum of 13m not in full time employment could be on ZHCs for at least part of their working life. It appears that a number of the total of 4.5m in self-employment, especially those 1.3m in part-time self-employment may be doubling up with ZHCs.

Of those self-reporting workers on ZHCs, presumably some also could be in full-time education still. Once again the above data does not appear to either identify or isolate those student ZHC workers.

There is a sizeable gap between the CIPD’s estimate of 1m on ZHC’s compared to the 1.3m in part-time self-employment, though an even bigger gap with the ONS’s LFS estimate of 0.7m. For LFS returns, they rely on workers being at home when the market researcher calls to interview you. So if you are out working then you will automatically be under-reported by the survey. If people are working on ZHC and are also part-time self-employed then they may also be far too busy to take the LFS survey.

Something appears very odd here. It seems inconceivable that suddenly three times as many food parcels are needed as people suddenly hit the wall. This must be connected to the clamp down on debt (via pay day lenders), meaning people are literally no longer able to obtain money or perhaps also due to the increased availability of food and food banks (free stuff is strangely popular) and reduced stigma relating to getting it. There are a large number of people perfectly willing to receive something for nothing and see no shame in it. The government has significantly increased the amount of tax free income people can earn so poor working people must be much better off despite rising costs. Plus more people are in work. It doesn’t add up and I refuse the believe the simplistic politically motivated spin that this is due to government policy.

Just wondering if any of your contributers above have endured the shame and humilation of having to go to a foodbank. Unfortualy after fighting a disease I was born with I was only able to work for 34 years in england Now on a good day I can get out of bed and into my wheelchair. Sorry about that, but i take 38 tablets every day for chronic pain and do my best to survive. I do not live anymore i cannot on the pittance given to me by DWP. The worst thing is the constant form filling in and every year having to prove I am really disabled. Oh yes has anyone ever tried to type with constant shaking hands ?

Listen to Paul Ross’s TalkRadio show show from this morning if you can find it on Podcast or the likes. It sheds a positive light on zero hour contracts. Kevin Brady from http://www.adview.co.uk actually give a very good account on why this type of working practise is good for the UK economy. There is always 2 sides to every argument but I think Kevin Brady’s makes a lot more sense than most!